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- Title
Electing Reform Barisan Nasional Neopatrimonialism as Impetus for and Challenge to Malaysia's Democratic Transition.
- Authors
Weiss, Meredith L.
- Abstract
Malaysia's May 2018 general elections saw the Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition voted out of office after more than six decades of rule. Key to that electoral upset was the extent to which corruption--specifically, a self-serving, far-reaching, neopatrimonial form-had pervaded the polity, notwithstanding a fairly elaborate anticorruption institutional architecture. The Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) coalition now in power, and especially its determined prime minister, the nonagenarian Mahathir Mohamad, placed governance and anticorruption at the top of its reform agenda and took immediate steps toward institutional reform upon assuming office. However, the nature of a transition by election, in which the state apparatus, as well as a significant share of politicians, are holdovers from the old regime; the imperative to distribute the unavoidable costs of reform so as not to irritate too many voters; and the fact that opposition to former Prime Minister Najib Razak may have been more a "push" factor than institutional reform was a "pull" in Pakatan Harapan's win complicate the invariably dicey and protracted task of democratic consolidation. At least some extent of meaningful governance reform is all but certain; how deep or far that remaking will reach is less clear at this stage in Malaysia's transition.
- Subjects
DEMOCRATIZATION; POLITICIANS; MALAYSIAN elections; VOTERS; CORRUPTION
- Publication
Taiwan Journal of Democracy, 2019, Vol 15, Issue 1, p41
- ISSN
1815-7238
- Publication type
Article